Nilsson, Jörgen

Abstract [en]

In the wake of increased e-government service and overall increase in creation of digital documents, the problem of preserving this kind of "digitally born" material has become imminent. This research focus on how to preserve the physical structure, in other words the layout, colours, logotypes, font characteristics and so on, of digital objects. The reason for this lies in the interest of preserving the information of digital objects, which besides what usually is seen as the content, namely the text or numerical values represented in the digital object, also includes the visual attributes since they contribute to the information drawn from the data in the digital object (document/form). The suggestion posed in this work is that the visual attributes could be described with metadata and, where applicable, "backdrops" in order to make the future rendition of the digital object as similar to the original as possible. Since it is possible to make exact bit-level copies of digital objects, and since they are recreated every time they are accessed, I use the term "metadata driven imitation" to emphasize that were not really dealing with originals, but instead imitative copies. One important benefit of this is that the content still is searchable and accessible, instead of frozen in a document which content is readable for humans but not for machines.